Recently I had the privilege of attending a marketing and branding training session at the Wright Leadership Institute – three of the most productive hours I’ve spent in the classroom a long while. One of the things our group did was put together a list of new rules of engagement for networking. With the Wright Institute’s permission, I’m sharing the list (in my own words) because it’s a marvelous compendium of best practices for communication on the social web.
How Business Should Communicate on the Social Web
- Be Available. People expect businesses to respond and engage at any hour of the day. Corporate walls, hierarchical structures that stall communication must be dismantled.
- Be Authentic. Spin doctoring is out. Admitting mistakes, acknowledging ignorance, seeking input and advice – that’s in.
- Be Open. Customers want to see behind the curtain. They want to understand your thought process, the policies, plans, and products you reject as well as those you launch.
- Be Relevant. We’re inundated with information on the web. Communication must matter.
- Be Brief. We’re inundated with information on the web. Communication must come to the point quickly.
- Get Personal. The social web is … social. People want to do business with people, not faceless corporate entities. Mixing business with pleasure has gone from taboo to table stakes.
- Give to Get. Hardball negotiating tactics go over like a lead balloon in social media. Bloggers and online networkers are a generous lot, people who believe that no good deed goes unrewarded. It’s a new mindset for certain organizations, but an indispensable one.
- Don’t Over Bang the Drum. Emphatic sales pitches endlessly repeated on Twitter and a business blog will ultimately fall on deaf ears. Communication must cover a wide range of topics directly, indirectly, or not at all related to core products and services.
- Have Fun. We said earlier that it’s OK to mix business with pleasure. Spicing up the web presence with lighthearted video, quizzes, and offbeat content is rapidly moving from acceptable to essential.
- Be Topical. When most people go online, they’re thirsty for news. Making business content topical and newsworthy maximizes interest.
- Use Narratives. Stories are compelling, as they always have been. The style of successful business communication today is based on story telling, not a sterile recitation of features and benefits.
- Be SEO Aware. Web content must speak persuasively to search engines as well as human beings. The proper use of keywords, HTML tags, and other SEO copywriting techniques make a business dramatically more visible in search, and bring more interested people to the table.
- Reach Out to Reel In. With thousands of social networking platforms and millions of blogs, the challenge is to determine where the customers are, and then engage them on their turf. The Build-It-And-They-Shall-Come philosophy – forever questionable in my judgement – cannot succeed on the social web.
- Go Short to Go Long. With the need for brevity, relevance, topicality, and everything else, online business communications forces us to sharpen our skills. Initial communication must be compact and compelling in order to draw attention and establish credibility. Subsequent communication must be deep and information rich in order to maintain credibility and build long lasting relationships.
- Increase Your Hubness. Following all these rules transforms people and organizations from communication wallflowers to communication hubs. As information flows through the organization from customers to prospects to peers to employees to evangelists, opportunities expand – opportunities for new business, new relationships, strengthened relationships, collaborations, new hires, new products, new ideas, and entire new markets.
Rule 2 - Be Authentic
Rule 9 - Have Fun
Not bad!
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“Be Available”
I think that’s the toughest one.
Once a company defines a position “Customer Relations” it seems to excuse the rest of us from the exercise of ‘dealing with’ customers. But the folks in customer relations are often walled off from real answers on what is going on.
Once a salesforce is built they often become the customers for much of an organization. We go along willingly, because dealing with real customers is messy, messy, messy. But what makes a salesforce happy isn’t always what makes a customer happy.
Being available can often mean taking time away from the work your boss measures you on. The work that seems more important. The work that takes 60 hours a week. Of course if you don’t take the time then you will slowly lose touch with your customers.
So we must take the time to ‘be available.’ Luckily the new tools that are available make it easier than ever.
Fred, You are right on all counts. I think customers are starting to expect 24/7/365 availability because best of class companies are offering exactly that. Whether it’s online chat, Twitter, or whatever – response times can be amazingly fast for any company innovative enough to re-engineer support functions to take advantage of technology. How long do you think it will take for this high level of service to go from unusual to commonplace?
Some brilliant advice here. Using Social Media is all about interacting with your customers and providing them with real people with whom they can engage. Making sure that you have a relevant Social Media strategy which reaches out to your customers in the most appropriate way is key. For example, you may be a web design company providing fresh information and ideas in quality blog posts or you may be a recruitment company posting new job listings on your Twitter or Facebook page which people can reply to (to find out further information or to put themselves forward for the job).
And I have to agree with Fred & Brad that the “Be Available” point is quickly becoming more and more of an expectation from customers.
Hi Nicola, Thank you for stopping by and your thoughtful comment. Availability was a big issue at the training session as well. You also mention relevance – this is one I’m especially sensitive to, as there is so much irrelevant information coming my way on various social media sites. I guess this is to be expected. In particular, people on Twitter (myself included) get fixated on the number of followers. When you value quantity over quality, you have to expect irrelevance to come your way. What’s the right balance?
Hi Brad. I think getting the balance between quantity and quality is certainly key. It separates those who are viewed as spammy from those who are respected for providing quality content with every hit. I think a good measure of this, on a Twitter page for example, is the way you react yourself to fellow Twitterers Tweets (!) – do they post too many? Have you started to overlook them? Or do you stop and think “Ooh, so and so has posted something new, I’m pretty sure that’s worth a look…”. Thoughts?
Nicola, Balance is key – I agree. I like to “mix up” my tweets with a variety of stuff – partly because my interests are all over the board, and partly because I think too much of one thing gets boring. In terms of reacting to others, a lot depends on my frame of mind. If I have time, I love it when people blast off a long string of interesting links. If I’m rushed, I’ll probably not pay much attention to it. But, I may make a mental note and remember that person as a valuable resource. If you Tweet too infrequently, you may not get on enough people’s radar. So I suppose that means you should err on the side of more Tweet volume rather than less. But that’s debatable.
Brad,
Many of these points seem to underline a fairly consistent theme: interactivity and two-way communication.
Whilst many things about marketing have not changed because of social media, this is one of the key points which has. Many forms of traditional marketing (advertisements, adverts etc) were about one way communication – business to consumer. But in social media, target audiences expect two-way engagement.
I like your points about being authentic, brief, relevant and avoiding spin doctoring. Target audiences are busy, and have no time for the clutter and ‘noise’ associated with companies trying to ‘spin doctor’ their message.
About the point of being open, I agree, but this can be overdone. In one recent example (though admittedly from the B2C world, but still relevant to B2B), a web services company published a blog post in which they apologised about a technical error which lead to massive overbilling of customers. Nothing wrong with that, but the apology (which was four A4 printed pages in length), was not only written in an extremely flippant manner given the nature of the communication, but went into great detail about how they had tried new systems and thought everything was OK (blah blah blah) and took four pages to get around to actually mentioning that the problem would be fixed and that affected customers would be compensated for any financial institution related charges resulting from the problem. Affected customers did not want to know about how staff were up till 3am trying to work out what went wrong, all they cared about was that the problems would be fixed and that they would not suffer disadvantage as a result (many customers wrote that they were leaving the firm as a result of the flippant nature of the apology)
The lesson: share and be open but do get to the point.
Andrew, Thank you for sharing such a fascinating case study. It sounds like the firm’s heart was in the right place, but they stumbled badly on execution. A good principle for writers to follow in cases like this – When in doubt, leave it out. As you say, customers in the heat of battle, experiencing extreme frustration, are in no mood to absorb a defensive, self serving, or tedious explanation. It may be that this content was written by committee, and a committee heavily weighted with attorneys and technicians at that. We can never forget the human touch in any kind of business writing – I’m talking about empathy, sincerity, and as you so aptly point out – brevity.
Brad, this is an excellent list. I was struck by how in reality the foundation of networking and marketing communication has not changed but the methods have certainly shifted dramatically and impact not only how we engage with our customers but how we apply the underlying rules of business.
Hi Karen, That’s a good observation. Actually, I’ve held the view that social media has brought us back to the way human communication was like – and supposed to be – before mass media. Stories were how we’ve communicated from day one. The Socratic method – based on conversation. Stories and conversation are perfect for the new media.