Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Annicka Campbell-Dollaghan
Global Social Insights Operational Lead, SapientNitro Chicago Cofounder and Operational Lead of Sapient Global Social Insights
Early in Mad Mens second season, Harry Crane, a junior employee at the agency, has just been tapped to build a television department from the ground up.
Nobodys an expert in the space least of all Crane, who continually crosses clients and coworkers as he goes. He lands an ill-timed product placement for Maytag that triggers a frenzied spate of Cold War-era crisis management. Eventually Harry realizes that growing a department in the space of emerging media can sometimes mean doing the job of multiple people including the heavy lifting, client interfacing and budget management. Harry Cranes fictional story from the 1960s resonates with present-day social media professionals. Social media is too often characterized by poor campaign planning, lack of staff support, and needless exercises in crisis management (can we all just agree that brands should never post anything related to national tragedies?). Growing a strong social brand is not for the weak of heart. Or mind. But making your brand a social one can make your organization into a more nimble and customer-centric one if you can overcome six key challenges facing social today.
Its no surprise then, that some of the campaigns, agencies, companies, and individuals failed some spectacularly. Many clients got burned with unmet promises, unrealistic budgets and schedules, and overall lack of expertise. Some are still haunted today. What we know today: Thankfully, we now have a deeper base of experience. We also tend to interface more closely with senior leaders throughout the organization and they are increasingly sophisticated in their understanding of the space, including investment and return on social engagement. Still, its a young domain, and brands continue to hire junior talent to drive their social strategies. According to a 2013 study1 of social media professionals, 47 percent of respondents said that their preferred level of experience for social practitioners is between one and three years and 25 percent use interns.
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Taco Bell added SnapChat to its social mix in 2013. SnapChat boasts 350M photos shared per day and is hugely popular with the 13 to 23 age group. One of the great challenges of social media management is the rapid change in platforms and tools.
Structuring a Social Media Team, Ragan.com and NASDAW OMX Corporate Solutions. 2013. See Alan Schulmans article on Brand Messaging in Real Time: Reaching the Always-on Customer for an alternative approach to staffing multidisciplinary social media teams.
infused its brand identity with risk and excitement, as well as friendship and shared experience. These attributes are perfectly in line with the functionality of SnapChat. What we know today: Its easy to get excited about a new channel and all of the potential it holds for our business. But when considering expanding a brand social presence onto a new channel, its essential to understand how the channel in question will add value to the existing or desired social customer experience. Focus on the underlying behaviors that a channel can help drive; the way channels connect to a broader ecosystem that supports the customer journey; and how they fit together to drive sales from an attribution standpoint. As for defining what that social experience might look like, we often find that a discussion of brand values or attributes can be a great jumping-off point for developing guardrails around social content, voice and messaging for a brand.
The now-classic social media case study, the Dirty Dirty Dominos Pizza video created by two employees who singlehandedly caused a massive social crisis was watched by millions of viewers and resulted in signicant damage to the brand and felony charges for the employees.
addressing the issue head-on in the very medium from which the issue arose (YouTube), Dominos was able to salvage its reputation and quickly launched a very successful social media strategy. What we know today: These early examples of social missteps during the first decade of 2000 brought the potential risks of social media to the forefront of our industrys conversation about the emerging medium of social. Just as Harry Cranes Maytag sponsorship resulted in a doubling of his workload to rule out any future accidents, community managers and social managers began to develop more robust processes for social. Its interesting to note that the Dominos experience with social media crisis prompted the brand to get more involved in the space, rather than shy away from social as a result. The brand recognized that it was subject to the tides of social conversation and crisis whether or not it was active in the space but that managing a social crisis was made much easier with the aid of an active presence and passionate community base. Once Dominos had invested in developing a process around crisis management after the incident, it was able to draw upon that resource over and over again to resolve future social issues including a well-publicized 2013 community management gaffe that the brand handled with wit and panache.
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Analytics Analytics is an essential foundation for brands social media platforms. Capturing social engagement through quantitative metrics provides the raw social data to benchmark success for future comparison, optimize strategy in and outside of social, and combine with other data sources for 360 views of customer experience.
Insights Quantitative and qualitative social insights are combined with findings from other sources to holistically answer questions that directly drive strategy in and outside of social media. Actionable insights are produced that inform results-focused strategy through deep understanding of consumer behavior, preferences, perceptions and needs in the social space.
Experience Bringing insight and strategy to life, Social Experience teams build and grow social communities through targeted social channels, customized communications, right-time content and media mix activations.
Strategy Social strategy builds the foundation and roadmap of the social customer experience, within the context of the broader customer journey and channel ecosystem. This includes social business operations and establishment of governance, as well as social channel, communications, content and media strategy.
Social media teams at SapientNitro focus on addressing and delivering value in the four major areas shown above. The Experience and Strategy categories are the most far-reaching as brands look to respond to changing consumer behavior and the rise of new communication methods.
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