Ford and social networking
There’s an interesting article – How Ford Got Social Marketing Right - on the Harvard Business Review blog, by Grant McCracken. In it, he talks about Ford have used social networking in an innovative and successful way to market the Fiesta model.
Ford did not approach early adopters to generate interest, but what he calls culture creators – people who create content on sites like YouTube. One hundred of them were given a car and encouraged to create content by being set challenges which they could then document.
How successful was this?
Fiesta got 6.5 million YouTube views and 50,000 requests for information about the car — virtually none from people who already had a Ford in the garage. Ford sold 10,000 units in the first six days of sales. The results came at a relatively small cost. The Fiesta Movement is reputed to have cost a small fraction of the typical national TV campaign.
McCracken outlines a three-step process for success:
- Engage culturally creative consumers to create content.
- Encourage them to distribute this content on social networks and digital markets in the form of a digital currency.
- Craft this is a way that it rebounds to the credit of the brand, turning digital currency (and narrative meaning) into a value for the brand.
Overall, a very good article, well worth a read.
Enterprise 2.0 – social networking in business
I want to draw attention to a new book – Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges, by Andrew McAfee (Harvard Business Press).
He discusses why email is still the king of communications technology in organizations, and has not yet been challenged by more modern social networking tools.
A review in the Financial Times by Richard Waters summarises my own feelings about the book:
McAfee correctly identifies the biggest reason for slow adoption: the resistance of individual workers to new ways of doing things that do not yield substantial and clear advantages to them. If e-mail gets the job done, why look further?
(…) There are other, deeper reasons behind the delayed arrival of Enterprise 2.0. As McAfee rightly says, Web 2.0 technologies are inherently egalitarian – they rely on treating each contribution equally, regardless of corporate hierarchy. That makes them a threat.
Organizations that want to use such tools need to change their culture to accept that people at all levels can make contributions to debate and discussion.
This book is definitely well worth a read.
Twitter used for business communication
As I have already said, social networking tools can be very useful – if used appropriately.
Here is a very good video that discusses how Twitter has been used successfully by one company to market its products.
Social networking tools for business – the good and the bad
I have already written about the value of corporate blogging – you can read that here. There are of course dangers associated with blogging and using other social networking tools.
Stephen Baker discusses some of the possible issues in an article in Business Week: “Beware Social Media Snake Oil“. As he says,
Employees encouraged to tap social networking sites can fritter away hours, or worse. They can spill company secrets or harm corporate relationships by denigrating partners. What’s more, with one misstep, one clumsy entrée, companies can quickly find themselves victims of the forces they were trying to master. Thousands of bloggers attacked Motrin last year because of an advertisement from the Johnson & Johnson brand they found demeaning to mothers.
I don’t really agree that employees will “fritter away hours”, but he does have a good point about the need to be careful about the kind of information that is put out.
In a related article “Is social business worth your time?” on the Harvard Publishing blog, Morten Hansen makes a point that might seem obvious, but is often forgotten in the rush to embrace new techniques and methods:
Social media tools are only useful for some problems. Managers need to ask, do social media tools solve my key challenges?
As well as as communicating externally, organizations should be looing at different ways of using social networking tools for internal communication. Again, it’s a question of choosing the correct tool. Employees in a high-tech company might be interested in the boss’ tweets, whereas such a tool would not be so well regarded by the staff at a more culturally conservative organization.
Social networking tools are not a panacea for all communication needs, but the right tool, used in the right way, can perform a very useful function.
Tiger Woods and lessons for corporate communications
I don’t wish on the personal difficulties of Tiger Woods and his family, but it strikes me that the way his advisers have handled the whole affair have made several mistakes. And I am not only one to think so.
For example, the Guardian says,
…the decision to remain hidden from public view since the accident may have been his biggest public relations mistake – and, perhaps most humiliatingly for such a proud man, it has become a running joke.
So what should he have done? Well, the basics of dealing with various kinds of disaster are fairly clear cut:
- Communicate: Admit there is problem
- Communicate: Apologize
- Communicate: Say what you are going to do about it
- Do it
- Communicate: Say what you did
The key thing is to be open. A classic case study is Johnson & Johnson whose product Tylenol was tampered with. A good summary is provided on Mallen Baker’s website. As he concludes:
The features that made Johnson & Johnson’s handling of the crisis a success included the following:
- They acted quickly, with complete openness about what had happened, and immediately sought to remove any source of danger based on the worst case scenario – not waiting for evidence to see whether the contamination might be more widespread
- Having acted quickly, they then sought to ensure that measures were taken which would prevent as far as possible a recurrence of the problem
- They showed themselves to be prepared to bear the short term cost in the name of consumer safety. That more than anything else established a basis for trust with their customers
PowerPoint and communication
An interesting article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung about PowerPoint presentations: Welch ein Folien-Theater!
It’s important to remember that PowerPoint is a tool – not the be-all and end-all. I have seen too many people spend too much time on making their slides look great, and not enough on making sure their ’story’ is a good one.
An invaluable tip is: First, prepare a storyboard, like film directors do. Literally draw what is going to be on each slide. Then think about ways of presenting the information in an interesting way.
To repeat: PowerPoint is only a tool.
Good questions for organizational change management
“What kind of employees do you want? What kind of organisation do you want?”
These questions are posed in an FT book review that you can read here. No matter how you answer them, you need to do some organizational change to have the kind of organization you want.
But before you decide, here’s a tip — speak to the employees first. They will tell you what organizational change is needed.
