“Working a Room” Through Social Media

Social Media personality, Gary Vaynerchuk, created an excellent video about “giving a presentation versus working a room”.

My summary of the premise:
Old school brands that only use display ads are limiting themselves. Traditional advertising allows only one direction – from the advertiser to the consumer. It’s analogous to giving a presentation and then not allowing for questions, getting in your car and leaving. There is no opportunity for feedback. There is little recognition if your audience understood what you were talking about, and no ability to learn from the audience to further craft your message for the future.

Social media, however, encourages interaction. By leveraging multiple tools such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and many more, you can converse with your audience. It’s analogous to working a room. You can have intimate conversations with constituents, learn from them, and address questions. The point is to be available and engage.

Lastly, social media is inexpensive. Many of these tools are free, and it only requires passionate people to interact with the constituents.

But Don’t Act too Quickly!
While Gary discussed the concept of working a room, it is critical to not act too quickly. New messages often need to be absorbed. People may be confused at first, and that may be OK.

For instance: The first time I saw the Budweiser frogs commercial, I laughed, but was confused. Why are frogs in a swamp, hardly an appetizing thought, saying “bud” “weis” “er”? If I had access to social media in 1995, I may have commented about their poor choice of spokesmen. Many others may have commented as well – and if Budweiser reacted, they would have not created one of the most successful advertising campaigns in history.

How do brands achieve success?

• Join the communities and understand how they work. Each one is unique and each has its own utility.
• Develop a strategy on how to leverage the online world and how you will address your constituents
• Integrate your offline marketing with online efforts and track results
• Strive to achieve balance between experimenting and staying the course
• Lastly, start NOW. Your competitors are.

“The worst financial crisis since the great depression” seems to be the headlines these days. What should financial services companies do? Communicate, communicate, communicate!

Many of the top financial services sites still have no mention, nor even a link, to their thoughts about the crisis. The media is consistently peppering the public about the state of the economy, yet clients are finding that the place that they entrust their money to, is silent!

Hey financial services companies: Clients and investors want to know what YOU think! They want to understand your company’s views of the markets, your investments, and what you think is going to happen. Even if there is no news, or bad news, keep people informed.
Don’t wait for the whitepaper to come out, or the official press release. Start the conversation early. Here are some ways this can be accomplished:

• Place some content on your home page: optionsXpress has a short paragraph with the title “A Safe Haven” to help bring confidence as clients log in
• Provide a link that builds confidence: Wells Fargo has a link to a CEO letter saying that they are “staying the course”.
• Start utilizing your corporate blog:
  • Allow an output for your experts to talk about the market – it allows clients to perceive they have access to the experts
  • Highlight discussions your executives are having with policy makers – it shows that you are in control and helping guide the US and the world
• Start monitoring twitter: it’s a great way to see how a segment of the market is talking about your brand

Overall, show empathy. People are nervous, frustrated, and annoyed. Being quiet only increases frustration. Start utilizing the tools that you have already invested in, and start communicating with your constituents.

What is your financial services company doing? What should they do to help you feel more informed, or confident?

A few thoughts on this Wachovia using Twitter.

In order to be successful with Twitter, Wachovia needs a 3 prong approach.

1. Create a site that accepts and fosters new traffic (that will come from Twitter, or other medium). It should have targeted information on the site that is conducted after careful analysis of user goals and needs.
2. Experiment with Twitter and other tools (as this article discusses)
3. Analyze and track through robust metrics and then grow the relationship on the site and twitter

In short, Twitter is great for ‘shouting’ a message, news, insight, etc – but the note then dies or gets buried in other Twitter traffic. The winning model is one where Twitter creates traffic back to the site, and where the site then tracks, fosters and molds the interaction into a long term relationship.

Lehman Brothers filing for chapter 11. Merrill Lynch sold. AIG receives a lifeline from the Fed. Washington Mutual having issues. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under government control. Bear Sterns sold.

In any radically changing market, opportunities can be found. While bad credit policies and poor oversight are the common blames for the current financial crisis, the Internet will help foster and grow innovation.

Major financial institutions, which previously only focused on the end retail customer, are now broadening their online profile to include the entire buy-side and sell-side supply chains. Spending on increasing communication, building relationships, and creating conviction are common themes.

Conviction is the confidence necessary to convert a prospective client into an actual client, and the critical assurance to keep clients from defecting. Personal relationships between asset managers and prospects (from institutional gatekeepers to broker/dealer producers) are the main conduit to creating this conviction.

Without this perceived relationship, prospects cannot “bet” on the portfolio manager. But personal relationships can’t scale. With over 650,000 registered securities representatives in the US alone, asset managers need additional tools.

How are companies augmenting relationships and creating conviction in financial services? The internet is assisting by providing content and managing perceptions. The following rules are being followed: Read more

Creating a digital customer experience is a balancing act that requires careful orchestration It needs to facilitate the customer’s next action. It needs to proactively steer the customer to their objective. It needs to allow for the changing desires of both the typical and the atypical customers. In short, a customer experience needs to thoroughly understand its constituent’s goals, needs, and behaviors. And the balancing part: it needs to be consistent with a long term brand, while supporting corporate objectives – and often be profitable.

Creating experiences requires critical strategic thinking, fostered by brainstorming options and prioritizing them based upon precise analysis and validation.

The opportunities are vast. An experience can be simple and elegant if appropriate, or it can help change an industry by being disruptive. Successful disruptive sites vary from:

• Ultrasimplicity: stripping away features to better meet the needs of customers.
• Online infusion: integrating online features into core offerings.
• Service infusion: integrating service features into core offerings.
• Service amplification: investing in distinctly high levels of service.
• Value repositioning: offering a radically different value proposition. [Source: “Five Disruptive Customer Experience Strategies,” Forrester Research, Inc., December 2, 2006]

Which is the right disruptive opportunity for your business? This is a strategic question.

Other experiences benefit from new technologies, often in the form of rich Internet applications RIAs). The investment for these new technologies can cost “less than $50,000 for small in-page applications to more than $500,000 for complex configurators”. The problem, “making a quantifiable business case is hard”. [Source: “The Business Case For Rich Internet Applications”, Forrester Research, Inc., March 12, 2007]

What new technology will enhance brand and provide competitive advantage vs. what is simply “cool” with limited results? This is a strategic question.

The Strategic Process

Strategy is a rigorous process requiring executive participation and cross-functional insight from multiple departments. Utilizing a robust mixture of workshops, interviews, data analysis, and strategic insight, a cohesive roadmap can be defined. The high level steps include outlining objectives, conducing research, and prioritizing opportunities. A high-level synopsis of the process follows:

Outline objectives

Interviewing stakeholders: The process needs to start out by interviewing key business stakeholders. Executives need to give their input on their overall objectives, concerns, and goals, and provide the opportunity to brainstorm.

Access past research: Companies usually have a plethora of usable research from past initiatives. Information from quantitative and qualitative studies, along with web log files provides insight into user base, corporate objectives, and provides information into past projects. By ignoring this data, time and money will be wasted.

Without this foundational step, an initiative will not have executive buy-in, will lose focus, and will be inconsistent with corporate objectives.

Conduct research

Qualitative and quantitative research: Stakeholders’ insight, qualitative interviews and quantitative surveys are used to segment constituents that demonstrate similar goals, needs and behaviors – called personas. Personas are used throughout the entire site creation process, and help prioritize functionality and roll out requests.

Without diligently conducting this research, and simply using “standard market data”, a generic experience will be created – one that won’t talk to the client’s brand, will not differentiate, and will not meet the customer’s expectations.

Evaluate and prioritize opportunities

The personas that represent the target audience will define key objectives of the experiences and functionality needs. Research will also show the expected result of implementing the initiative – measured in dollars and loyalty. Using data obtained in the stakeholder interviews, paired up with implementation experience, investment criteria can be obtained – resulting in a detailed roadmap complete with return on investment.

This step is the link between “an interesting experience” and “business value”. It shows the rollout plan, the reasons for investment, and the expected results. It is based on detailed research and is fact based.

These steps are essential to creating a compelling customer experience – one that drives adoption and across a broad set of customers in a profitable manner. How has your company developed their strategy? I look forward to responses and feedback at eric.karofsky@molecular.com.